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There may be many routes to a Nobel Prize, but one of the most direct is to perform an experiment that shatters the strongly held beliefs of an entire scientific discipline. The latest illustration of that principle came this year, with the award of the prize for medicine or physiology to Phillip Sharp of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Richard Roberts, who recently moved from Long Island's Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to the biotech firm New England Biolabs in Beverly, Massachusetts. Before 1977, the biology community believed firmly that genes were uninterrupted pieces of DNA that coded for proteins. That year, however, the two molecular biologists, working independently, showed conclusively that a gene is often broken up by lengthy tracts of DNA that do not specify protein structure.
The discovery of these so-called split genes not only dramatically changed how biologists viewed gene structure and function but also had enormous consequences for the study of gene regulation and evolution, and for biotechnology. Indeed, James Darnell of Rockefeller University, whose own data in retrospect hinted that genes contain noncoding sequences, says he doesn't think it's an overstatement to call the work of Sharp and Roberts "the single most surprising and illuminating experiment...